Video Games

Video Games

[Photo is of my Son Alex playing on my computer]

From childhood until today, video games have been a passion of mine. I remember the first video game system I ever asked my Mom to buy me was a dedicated breakout game. I remember getting the system when I was about 11 or 12. Shortly after that I remember getting an Atari 2600 which was the first mainstream consumer based video game system.

If you read the story about how I fell in love with computers you know that a video game was the gateway drug. Video games would continue to be the carrot that continued my fascination with computers. I remember buying magazines like Compute! or books where I would have to type in the source code for a game. When I began high school I graduated to my first computer, a Commodore Vic-20 then followed by an Atari 400 and then 800. I then returned to the Commodore 64 and the cycle of switching from Commodore would continue when 16 bit computers emerged. I got the Atari ST and later the Commodore Amiga. Eventually I got my first PC “clone”, an AMD DX-40, which is what we called machines that we built ourselves from parts that ran DOS.

Games on computers were still pretty rudimentary at this point. They were still limited to using a 256 color palette.